URSUS HOLZWORTHI

While foraging at the Washington, DC branch of Second Story Books, my favorite noon-time habitat, I came across a book that perfectly intersected two of the main themes of this website, evolutionary biology and genealogy. The author's name on the spine, John T. Holzworth, first caught my attention. The title of the book further arrested me -- The Wild Grizzlies of Alaska: A Story of the Grizzly and Big Brown Bears of Alaska, Their Habits, Manners and Characteristics, Together with Notes on Mountain Sheep and Caribou, The Appendix sold me: C. H. Merriam on a new grizzly from the Talkeetna Mountains, Alaska 'Ursus holzworthi'.

With a nod to my literary friend Jonathan Swift, I have a modest proposal to make for a compromise in the ongoing screaming match between Biblical literalists and scientific dogmatists. This grizzly book, it appears, would provide substantial evidence for a unified field theory of genealogy and evolutionary biology, one the tracing of ancestors through a nomenclature of maternal and paternal surnames and the other through cladistics that focus on commonalities of structure, function, behaviors and, of course, genetics.

No reader of the Bible can be ignorant of the importance of genealogy; the Bible, in fact, more or less follows a genealogical structure starting with the first man and woman (Genesis 1:26 and then again in Genesis 2:15). The Bible then catches us up at various points along the way to the flood, the aftermath and through Abraham to the time of David on the family history. All of this phylogeny is recapitulated as ontogeny in the "begats" that begin the beguine in the first book of Matthew, a dance that gets us from Abraham to Jesus of Nazareth.

For their part, the scientific dogmatists have debts to pay, at least initially, to the brilliant classification system devised by Linnaeus that essentially laid out the familial relationships of all living things. Until Darwin, and the lesser known Wallace, religious and proto-scientists thought of the relationship as an essentially static and unchanging hierarchical chain of being. Darwin, and the lesser Wallace, upset the paradigm with the dynamic explanation of evolution through natural selection.

Why not, I ask with my friend Swift whispering in my ear, make the inferential leap of faith that my ancestors, at least, descended from bears? It would get the monkey off our backs, so to speak, and the the ursus holzworthi does bear the family name. It seems to me that the Biblical literalist should be delighted to swap the monkey for a bear.

What more noble ancestor can one have than the grizzly bear and the larger Alaskan variety known as the Kodiak? For one thing, we need no longer feel humilated by that embarrasing trait of monkeys and apes, beings prone to brachiambulation, tails that remind one of devils and those odd looking feet that look more like hands. Bears seem to get around quite well on two feet, rising to the occasion of their essential humanness. And their diet is far more interesting as well. Omnivores just like us, and no natural enemies, except us. In addition, we have a celestial objective-corelative to seal the deal. What better sign of divine intent than the incorporation of the pole star into Ursus Minor (the baby bear beaing a symbol of the Nativity) whose location can be found by extending the points of the Big Dipper, essentially a cup or Holy Grail, found in Ursus Major (a symbol of the father bear).

Now the taunting dogmatists of reductionist science must admit that somewhere along the line, ursine and homonid had a common ancestor. So let's go back in time, forget the monkey business, and celebrate the bear facts of necessity.

I have made my case and submit it to my readers to accept or reject.